Book bit bullets I

Because sometimes you only have a sentence worth of content and it seems foolish to make them all their own posts.

One that probably will be a separate post, if I can find the images, but it’s too late in the day now: Jerrilyn Dodds is clearly very clever and has reminded me in an impressively subtle and persuasive article that architecture genuinely can be an important window, no pun intended, on ideology.1

Jonathan Phillips‘s book about the Latin kingdoms of the Holy Land and their links to the west, though it does go through some background details too thickly and/or several times over, is still a really intriguing account of the East itself in that era, tying together a number of strands that would otherwise probably get left out of an ordinary history of the Latin settlements.2

Lastly, radio-carbon dating has its problems because of the need to calibrate, as we know, but even as I’ve been drafting this post scientists have been on the case and the calibration curve considerably refined, as you may have seen. This makes it downright contrary of me to have just caught up with a five-year-old paper arguing that, even when advances of this sort are made, what they reveal is not greater precision in dating, but that there are problems inherent in the samples we use to date stuff in the first place that possibly make precision tighter than currently available impossible anyway!3

See something wrong?

I know my recall isn't perfect, and I'm always anxious to correct mistakes and happy to acknowledge them. If you think a correction is necessary or appropriate, please leave a comment or contact me by e-mail.